Who was Robin Hood? As with any long-lived figure in the popular imagination — and the legend of the outlaw of Sherwood Forest and his Merry Men goes back to the Middle Ages — the answer changes with the times. In the movies he has been played most memorably by Errol Flynn, most forgettably by Kevin Costner and now, least merrily, by Russell Crowe.

In the long, bloody, self-serious new version of the legend, directed by Ridley Scott from a script by Brian Helgeland, Robin is not “Hood” at all, but Longstride, an archer in the army of King Richard the Lionheart on his way home from the Crusades. Perhaps taking its cue from the recent spate of superhero origin stories, “Robin Hood” takes us back to the character’s early life, and shows how he became the mischievous outlaw of future Mel Brooks and Bugs Bunny spoofs.

You may have heard that Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, but that was just liberal media propaganda. This Robin is no socialist bandit practicing freelance wealth redistribution, but rather a manly libertarian rebel striking out against high taxes and a big government scheme to trample the ancient liberties of property owners and provincial nobles. Don’t tread on him!

So is “Robin Hood” one big medieval tea party? Kind of, though that description makes the movie sound both more fun and more provocative than it actually is. The film’s politics, in any case, are more implicit than overt, so that the filmmakers can plausibly deny any particular topical agenda. Which is fair enough: the fight of ragged warriors against sniveling and sadistic tyrants appeals across tastes and ideologies. In our own minds, at least at the movies, we are all embattled underdogs standing up for our rights against a bunch of overprivileged jerks who won’t leave us alone.

Mr. Scott and Mr. Crowe are old hands at stirring up this kind of vengeful, righteous populist passion. They did it most successfully in “Gladiator,” which this picture resembles perhaps a little too closely. Mr. Crowe, heftier than he was back in those ancient Roman days, and attired in earth-toned tunics instead of sandals and togas, is adept at finding nuances within bluntly conceived characters. Robin is obviously cut from the same cloth as the gladiator Maximus, Jack Aubrey (from Peter Weir’s “Master and Commander”), and Jim Braddock (of Ron Howard’s “Cinderella Man”), but he displays a slyness and cunning appropriate to the story and the setting.

If only the story were leaner and more nimble — but then again this is a Ridley Scott film, so you go in expecting bombast and bloat in the service of leaden themes. You also expect skill and precision in the orchestration of large-scale action sequences, and there are enough of those in “Robin Hood” to keep you alert and fitfully engaged. For my money the best Ridley Scott set piece is an early scene in which King Richard (Danny Huston) and his soldiers pause in their slog home from Palestine to lay siege to a French castle. It’s a fairly pointless assault, and the results are catastrophic, but the battle gives Mr. Scott the opportunity to conduct a brief, brutal seminar in 12th-century military tactics, complete with massed archers, wall climbers and vats of boiling oil.

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Mr. Crowe as Robin Hood.Credit
David Appleby/Universal Pictures

He also engages in muscular and fast-moving exposition, sketching out the personalities of at least a half-dozen important characters (including Robin’s future right-hand outlaw, Little John, played by Kevin Durand) in the midst of the martial chaos. Mr. Scott also sets up a neat little joke: the French, being French, have a bunch of chefs serving soup in the middle of the fight, one of whom picks up a bow and fires an arrow that will change the course of British history.

The idea that an ordinary, anonymous person can have a big impact on world events is an attractively democratic notion — one systematically undermined by the rest of the movie, which loads Robin with trappings of heroism that prove paralyzing to the narrative. Fleeing the rout of the English Army, Robin comes upon a dying knight, Robert Loxley (Douglas Hodge), whose identity and sword he takes back to Nottinghamshire. There, Loxley’s wife, Marion (Cate Blanchett), and father, Walter (Max von Sydow), are fending off the tax collectors, the church and the nasty sheriff (Matthew Macfadyen). Robin and Marion engage in a bit of heavy-handed screwball antagonism before the imperatives of tax reform and heterosexuality unite them forever.

Meanwhile — and believe me, there is a whole lot of meanwhile in this crowded, lumbering film — King Richard has been replaced by his younger brother John (Oscar Isaac). Richard was nothing great: he nearly bankrupted the country to finance his crusades. But John is much worse, which you know right away because, unlike his brother, he is more interested in sex than in fighting. And more interested in having sex with an imported French aristocrat (Léa Seydoux) than with his lawful English wife. John’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Eileen Atkins), something of a French aristocrat herself, does not approve. So maybe they’re not all bad.

The anti-French animus of “Robin Hood” is amusingly over the top — the French monarch is first glimpsed slurping oysters — but also perhaps a little anachronistic, belonging less to 1200 than to 2003, the height of the Freedom Fries era. But somebody has to be the villain, and “Robin Hood” has a pretty good one in Godfrey (Mark Strong), a two-faced courtier whose diabolical scheme is to foment civil war between John and the northern nobles so that the French can conquer England all over again, just as they did in 1066.

As it crashes and bellows toward its sanguinary end, “Robin Hood” makes a hash of the historical record, and also of its own hero’s biography, the truth of which is revealed through a series of preposterous and unsatisfying flashbacks. Who was Robin Hood? After more than two hours of flaming arrows, loud music and defiant sloganeering, it’s oddly hard to tell. He’s for liberty though — the English kind, by the way — so if you have anything bad to say about him, you’d better say it in French.

Directed by Ridley Scott; written by Brian
Helgeland, based on a story by Mr.
Helgeland, Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris;
director of photography, John Mathieson;
edited by Pietro Scalia; music by Marc
Streitenfeld; production designer, Arthur
Max; costumes by Janty Yates; produced
by Mr. Scott, Brian Grazer and Russell
Crowe; released by Universal Pictures.
Running time: 2 hours 11 minutes.